XOXO
by somehowunbroken
Summary: John and Torren have a conversation.


John and Torren have a conversation. For kissbingo on LJ: letter (XOXO).

* * *

"Why is those letters there?"

John looked up from his book to see Torren clutching at a few pieces of paper. He had agreed to babysit the three-year-old while Teyla and Kanaan went and did some sort of adults-only Athosian ritual thing back on the mainland. To John, 'babysitting' meant letting Torren race his remote controlled cars around the City, which had been great until Torren had rammed one into Woolsey's leg and the irritated leader had given John a glare that promised bureaucratic retribution if he didn't make it stop. John had taken the boy back to his quarters and given him some things to play with while John himself relaxed a little and tried to get through a little more of _War and Peace._

"What letters, buddy?" He'd been on-again, off-again teaching Torren the English alphabet, and the kid had a pretty good grasp of them by now. He couldn't really read, per se, but he could pick out and identify any of the letters, which John considered a personal victory, given the scarcity of their informal lessons.

Torren jabbed down at the papers he held. "X-O-X-O," he read, pointing to each one as he read it. "And then it has L-O-V-"

"Where did you find those?" John asked, reaching over to pluck the pages from Torren's hands. He smoothed them out on his bedspread; Torren hadn't wrinkled them, not really, and John felt an absurd rush of relief. He folded them carefully and put them back in his bedstand drawer, making a mental note to invest in some sort of lock or something if he was going to keep watching the kid.

"I sorry, Uncle John," Torren said, his head hanging down and the telltale shuffling of his feet signaling that he thought he was in Big Trouble. "I just try to read them. I sorry."

"Hey, buddy, it's okay," John said. "I'm not mad. Just – ask before you take things out of drawers, okay?" He paused. "And cabinets."

Torren nodded and climbed up net to John, and John helped him settle against his body. Satisfied, Torren turned around and looked up at him. "What word does that make? X-O-X-O."

John shifted, not sure how to explain, and suddenly not sure if it was his place to do so. Wasn't the birds and the bees thing Kanaan's problem? He blinked and shook his head, smiling down at the little boy, and almost laughed at himself. Hugs and kisses Torren could understand.

"Those are letters," John said, indicating the drawer he'd tucked them into. "Those pieces of paper – somebody wrote a message down and sent it to me. It's called a letter."

Torren frowned. "A-B-C is letters," he pointed out. John frowned at English in general.

"It's the same word, but it means two different things," he tried to explain. Torren nodded, accepting that easily enough, and John continued. "When a person writes X-O-X-O at the bottom of a letter like that, it means hugs and kisses, like they're sending you hugs and kisses on the paper, since they can't be where you are to give them to you for real."

"X," Torren said thoughtfully, before reaching up and crossing his arms around John's beck in a vice grip. "Cause you make a X with your arms. And O," he said, smiling, "because your mouth makes a O!" He finished with a sloppy baby kiss to John's cheek, and John felt himself grin as he held the toddler to him.

"Yeah," he replied, giving Torren an equally sloppy kiss on his little cheek. The boy giggled and twisted away from him, jumping from the bed. He stopped suddenly and stared at the door, and John turned as well, hearing the chimes.

Teyla, he decided, glancing at the clock. He opened the door with a thought and called, "Come in!"

"Momma!" Torren shrieked, running over to clutch at Teyla's legs. "X-O-X-O-X-O-X-O!"

Teyla blinked down at her son. John grinned and reminded himself to tell her about that Earth custom later. She swung the boy up gracefully. "And how was your time with Uncle John?" she asked, directing the question to both of them.

Torren babbled away about cars and Uncle Woolsey and letters while John simply said, "We had fun."

When they left, John reached over and took the letters from his bedstand, smoothing them out on his bed again. He didn't know why he kept them, didn't know how they'd even survived all this time, but they'd come with him on every single deployment he'd ever been on, and he somehow absurdly attributed his own survival in some way to the letters, as if they were some sort of good-luck charm. He spread them out now and re-read each of the five letters, written nearly twenty years before. They all started the same way, _My dearest John,_ and they all ended the same way, too, _XOXO, Love, Nancy_.


End file.
